Bonjour, spy!
In a shocking first, a new film made entirely using artificial intelligence premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday.
The 95-minute film, called “Hell Grind,” was produced by a team of 15 people in just two weeks and cost $500,000. According to the Wall Street Journal, $400,000 of that went toward computational costs.
By contrast, Disney’s The Mandalorian and Grogu, which opens in theaters this weekend, reportedly cost $166.5 million.
San Francisco startup Higgsfield AI is touting its sci-fi experiment as “the world’s first AI feature film,” and also released a trailer on Wednesday.
It’s a cheap combination of Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it’s packed with violent fantasy action sequences and tells a tale of gods and monsters. The narrator says, “Long before humans appeared on earth, there was a war between angels and demons.”
The process of creating “Hell Grind” was much more involved than jotting down notes on ChatGPT.
“You can’t go into the AI world and say, ‘Make me a cool 95-minute video,'” Adil Alimzhanov, Higgsfield’s head of content, told the magazine.
Creators must enter prompts into the tool that average 3,000 words with detailed style specifications (such as “cine lenses,” 180-degree shutter motion blur, etc.), and each prompt results in just 15 seconds of footage.
The final product was screened at a prestigious French festival that did not shy away from controversy, showcasing the company’s superior technology.
“This is the first AI movie to demonstrate that AI can maintain character coherence, world coherence, and narrative arc across a feature length,” Higgsfield founder Alex Mashrabov wrote on LinkedIn.
AI is also a hot topic in Hollywood and Cannes. The nearly four-month SAG-AFTRA strike that brought the industry to a standstill in 2023 was carried out in part over concerns about its use. But this year, festival-goers are showing a more open-minded attitude toward it.
Actress Demi Moore said at a press conference: “AI is here, so fighting AI means fighting a battle that we lose.”
